1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to technology for deploying and synchronizing data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Web-based software applications have emerged as powerful tools which provide valuable services to vendors and customers alike. E-business web applications can be configured to operate in accordance with business logic to implement a variety of processes which facilitate electronic commerce. Such applications may also provide services which interact with remote Internet clients and/or applications.
The JAVA™2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), available from Sun Microsystems, Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., facilitates the development of electronic business web applications that run within the context of multi-tier enterprise applications. The operation of such web applications is governed by the data (“application data”) used to configure the web applications. As a result, the functionality provided by web applications can be modified by updating the application data associated with the applications.
Unfortunately, the deployment and synchronization of new or updated application data to J2EE web applications can be a cumbersome process. Newly-authored application data is often stored in a database in accordance with a particular schema used by the database. If a developer seeks to deploy such application data to a running production server, the data must be extracted from the database before being converted into a form suitable for transmission to the server. Scripts are often necessary to export the application data from a database into a file system. Scripts may also be necessary to import the application data to a running server. For these reasons, maintaining different versions of application data can also be an awkward and unwieldy endeavor.
Moreover, before new application data can be moved to a running production server, it may be necessary to deploy the application data to multiple servers to comply with a multi-stage testing process. This transfer of application data can be a cumbersome manual process which becomes increasingly error-prone as application data is transferred from server to server and more persons are involved. Thus, prior techniques of deploying and synchronizing application data in the context of the J2EE platform can be largely ad-hoc and undesirable.